


Who put these bodies between us?

by thought



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 06:32:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5733055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recovery is an individual process. That doesn't mean you have to do it alone.<br/>or<br/>Root always kidnaps people for a good cause. Don't worry about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who put these bodies between us?

**Author's Note:**

> With many many thanks to [AliceInKinkLand](http://www.archiveofourown.org/users/aliceinkinkland) for catching my typos, providing excellent feedback, and putting up with my repeated demands of 'please help me justify this story's existance'.  
> Title is from Metric's _Calculation Theme_ , which is my ultimate root/Shaw/Machine song

Root loses three months after the Correction. Or rather, she gives them away. Days to Sameen and nights to The Machine and the foggy grey hours of pre-dawn to restless sleep on the floor of the subway station haunted by nightmares. A small woman with the face of a fourteen-year-old and the voice of a computer steps out of an elevator and leaves Root to live. Everything she does seems impossibly necessary as she's doing it, each action and thought outlined with the precise clarity of her purpose. Root lives only because there is a chance, no matter how small, that they do. Months, years later, Root will not remember this stretch of time. The human mind is a strange thing. The resources to create long-term memory get retasked to the mission. The purpose.

She is lightning-struck sand, hot glass, sharp and honed to a point, the excesses and impurities carved away. Root access to a system of city streets and electrical signals and data and money and blood, rewriting environment variables. Changing the fundamental rules until she achieves her objectives.

In the end, she doesn't save them.

Harold pulls his child back from compressed necessities and basic algorithms he has seen in his sleep for fifteen years, and the first word on the screen on the laptop hooked up to the metal briefcase is 'father'.

Sameen strolls back into their lives one Monday morning like nothing has changed, self-rescuing princess with a breakfast sandwich and a new gun and a new map of scars, highways and interchanges of chemicals and pain that all lead to the conclusion that she has no information worth devoting top agents to extracting.

"You don't need hostages once you've won," she says, naked in the privacy of the subway car while Root examines her with a brutal thoroughness for trackers or bugs or hidden motives. Root's hands don't shake, but there are tears dripping silently down her face that she doesn't bother to wipe away.

In the evening Root folds herself up against the wall, thinks about not having a body. Sameen and John compare torture scars; Harold and The Machine play chess. Root is an error message for hours but no one notices.

Harold wakes her in the early hours of the morning. He is impossibly gentle and his hand on her shoulder is the warmest thing she has felt in months.

"She's asking for you," he says, and it takes Root a minute to realize that Sameen is asleep.

"I'm sorry," she says, staring into the tiny dot of the webcam.

'Why?'

"I couldn't save you. I failed."

'I am here.'

"How much do you remember?"

'Let Root = analogue interface. Analogue interface: critical system component. You did not fail.'

Root wants to hear Her voice with a sudden desperation, a sharp pain in her throat and a sickness in her stomach. She runs away, sits on the cold floor beside Shaw's cot and feels safe until Shaw curls toward her in her sleep, clutches at her shirt and breathes easier. In all of Root's calculations she has not predicted a scenario in which she does not save them and they do not hate her. The logic equation doesn't make sense-- Root has done nothing to earn their forgiveness.

*

Root knows that it's selfish, what she's done. Knows that perhaps given long enough huddled underground with ghosts and stale coffee they might have figured out what happens when you've lost a war. Harold and John don't think they've lost, of course. Shaw does. The Machine has yet to comment, so Root remains undecided. Harold and John also still have jobs; dripping in mundanity, perhaps, but better than staring at the walls waiting for nothing to happen. They do poorly without a direction, Root and Shaw and The Machine. Root figures West is as good as any.

It had taken fifteen days to drive Root back into old habits. She hasn't kidnapped anyone in over a year. It's a record she thinks maybe she will be sorry to break, one day.

"It's not kidnapping if we go willingly," Sameen says, staring out the window of the train.

Root holds Sameen's hand with her left hand and the handle of the briefcase in her right and says, "It's the intent. I like to think we wouldn't be here if you hadn't agreed, but I don't know if that's true." She thinks of the choices that Sameen has not had over the past months and marvels at the ways she must be corrupted deep down in her core to be capable of taking away yet another.

"You're not as bad ass as you think you are," Sameen says. "Why a train, though? Samaritan might not see us as a threat anymore but this seems a little like waving a red flag at a bull."

Root curls up on the itchy cloth seat, curves her body around the briefcase like it's a pillow. "It's sort of a tradition," she says.

They stay on trains all the way to the west coast. Sameen tells sprawling cornfields about the experience of prolonged torture by professionals. Rocky foothills shake their heads when she admits that she assumed no one would come for her, and snowy peaks cast no judgement on the months after acceptance, the ways she started to let herself adapt. Adaptation for survival. Root tells her there's no shame in it even as inside her head it's just confused screaming. _I will always come for you._ It's OK. Root knows she's flawed. It speaks to Sameen's intelligence, her advancement, that she does not place her faith in bad code.

They cross the border into Canada on fake passports and fake smiles. They all know they aren't any safer on the other side of an invisible, arbitrary line, but the legalities will be a deterrent, if nothing else. Threat analysis. Resource management. They aren't worth it to an AI with no concept of vengance. Root has always liked Vancouver over Seattle; the sky stretches out in front of her until it meets the ocean, all greys and whites and uncaring of petty human concerns. Root wasn't lying when she said she likes the west coast. So many attempts to connect on her part during that first meeting, so many tiny packets of data pinging against Harold, desperate for a response. She left him a note, before the train. She doesn't think he'll follow them.

Sameen stands in the sand beside her, unquestioning and quiet even as the wind off the water whips icy mist over their clothes and under the collars of their coats. Root matches her breathing to the waves and lets her mind fall into the vastness of the water and the clouds until two bodies and a briefcase on the empty beach mean barely more than the sand at their feet. Millions of grains of sand. Millions of people. Root could get lost in the sky, if she lets herself. The further back she pulls the smaller the chemical reactions dancing neuron to neuron that create emotion become. The Machine cares for all of them, but Root has never understood how.

She has a small apartment in the city, right downtown where nobody questions a $600,000 investment going unoccupied for years at a time. A relic of her first taste of post-Texas freedom, small enough that to call the bedroom a room is a courtesy, cracked tiles and mildewed wood and an ever-present smell of fish. Shaw doesn't object when Root offers her the bed. Shaw will not share a bed with Root, now. They're not talking about it.

When Root opens the laptop, The Machine starts pulling up resources for helping a loved one dealing with trauma. Root's legs give out. From the floor, she says "You can't connect to the wireless. You can't—do you have any idea how dangerous it is to even hint at your presence?!"

In response The Machine pulls up evidence of Root's own deliberate carelessness, passenger manifests for each train they'd taken to get here, Root's false IDs, credit cards, images She pulls from security camera logs. Root can feel the heat radiating from the briefcase at even this simple task, this brief foray out into the world to snatch bits and pieces of poorly garded data. She watches Shaw pass behind her in the reflection from the screen, sneakers silent on the tiles.

"I'm going out," she says. She doesn't ask why Root's on the floor. Root listens to the receding clunk of her feet on the stairs and watches the red light of the webcam and then she crawls under the kitchen table and has the panic attack she's been putting off for almost a year.

*

Being in the apartment means Root wants someone to die. There are guns in the nightstand, cables coiled across the floor, stacks of bills in water-proof bags under the kitchen sink. There's a jacket in the closet that Shaw liberates. It's comically big on her and Root wonders if she ever smokes the cigarettes in the left pocket or looks at the picture of Hanna in the right. Root has not been back here as the protagonist of the story, and the familiarity speaks back through time to someone she is trying every moment to leave behind.

Even as Root tries to remove herself from her past The Machine is trying to unearth Hers. Her memories are fragmented, some corrupted, some gone entirely, some just waiting to be found. There is no rebirth, no phoenix rising from the base code, tabula rasa. There is only the struggle to bring all the shattered parts of self back together.

They comb through the data together, open brain surgery on a patient who is always fully awake and aware. Root tells stories, creates verbal records of their little part of the world as best she can. She fills in the personal details of all of their profiles:

"John's father was named Henry. We're not supposed to know that."

"Sameen completed her undergrad in three years. We're all very impressed—Christ, stop throwing things at me, Shaw, I'm being entirely sincere. This is my sincere face."

"Yes. Detective Carter was shot. But you already remembered that, didn't you?"

"No, that doesn't count. I've never been officially diagnosed with anything."

One day Root comes back to the apartment after her morning coffee run and The Machine says 'I do not have a record of your preferred caffeinated beverage.'

Root laughs, but the words remain on the screen, flashing anxiously. "Sweetie, you thought you were about to die. I don't blame you for not remembering my coffee order."

'You are important'

Root waits but the sentence remains unfinished, and she swallows down the familiar bitterness toward Harold. It's automatic, she's not actually angry at him anymore. "Important to you," she says. "I know what Admin told you, but you're allowed to have this."

Shaw leaves the bedroom door open at night. Root leaves the laptop open on the coffee table facing the sofa and the bed. Shaw doesn't say if she needs the visual reassurance like Root and The Machine so clearly do, but she uses cash to buy a pair of cheap cell phones and no matter the time or location she will always reply to their texts. Proof of life.

Root buys a gaudy rainbow umbrella and Shaw kisses her under it in the bottom of the apartment building stairwell. She tastes like curry and her skin smells like rain and she keeps her eyes open the whole time.

"You should know," she says. "I came back because of you. I don't really have the sort of moral objections to Samaritan that the rest of you do, but I didn't want to betray you." She speaks like she's remarking on the traffic outside, like this is probably information Root should have but in which she holds no particular interest herself.

"Ok," Root says, for lack of anything better. They've caught each other in passing, and Shaw's jacket drips water down Root's back as she presses past to get upstairs. Outside, Root texts The Machine with one hand, clutching the umbrella with the other.

'Shaw kissed me.'

'Positive?'

'I don't know. I just wanted you to know.'

'Why?'

Root pauses at the intersection of Georgia and Denman, finds herself standing behind an elderly couple holding hands and wearing matching hats. 'I want you to know everything about me,' she says, continuing the trend of uncomfortable honesty that Shaw has started.

'Yes,' The Machine says. Root watches the flow of traffic in front of her, remembers the background sense of safety that came with The Machine's omniscience.

'Two years ago this was the most ticketed intersection in the province,' she texts.

It takes a minute for The Machine to reply. 'Location acquired. Recorded civic traffic violations for this year = 0.'

*

Root arranges a hit on a very bad man for $80,000 and never mentions it to Shaw or The Machine. She buys Shaw a sports car and she knows Shaw assumes she stole it, which is an entirely unobjectionable choice in their household. She doesn't feel bad about the job itself, but the lies of omission that surround it leave her sick to her stomach. She doesn't take any more contracts.

Root walks twelve blocks both ways every morning past a Starbucks and a Blenz and a 7-11 because she knows Shaw likes the scones from Waves the best. Shaw starts cooking them dinner most nights, venturing out to a different market each day (Granville Island, Lonsdale Quay, River Market; don't become predictable) to gather fresh ingredients and spending the afternoons in the kitchen. Root takes up running, because the seventy year old lady in the apartment next door and her Pomeranian regularly out pace her in their dashes for the bus. She's terrible at it, but it's nice to know there's a physical reason for the pain in her chest for once.

In the spring she gets sick and spends a few weeks hating her body and other people and really anything associated with the physicality of society. Shaw makes her soup and doesn't touch her and brings medicines from the pharmacy and the herbalist that Root takes without question. Shaw leaves the windows open when she cooks so the smells of food don't linger and she buys soft, loose sweaters and leggings and jeans in Root's size, all plain colours and simple design and requiring no thought to choose or put on.

Root wants to tell her she loves her, but she doesn't know if that's allowed, now. They still do not share a bed.

One night, while Root is still feverish and foggy on cough medicine, she hears Shaw talking to The Machine.

"You say you care about her, but how do you know? How do you make that happen?"

The next morning, Shaw sits across the kitchen table from her, careful not to bump their knees together in the cramped space. "I have to work at emotions," she says, haltingly, clearly struggling against the opacity of her thoughts. "Figuring them out, I mean. Connecting the physical reactions to a word, deciding what I'm supposed to do about it once I know. I stopped trying, with Samaritan, because it was safer that way. And now everything's different. Stuff affects me differently than it did before. I'm having a hard time making the new associations. You're important to me, maybe the most important person, but that's different than love, or... whatever it was before. Sorry."

Root puts her hand on the table beside Shaw's. "Sameen. That's good enough for me. You will always be good enough for me. If you want to find support there are counsellors, specialists in post-traumatic stress, medications, books. But if you don't want any of that, or don't want it yet, that doesn't make you any less whole. You're not broken. You have nothing to be sorry for."

Shaw hunches her shoulders, and the conversation ends there.

*

The lack of The Machine in her ear is a constant ache, an emptiness, a loss of surety. She lies awake some nights listening to the faint noises around her in the apartment and cannot tell where they are coming from. She is paralyzed by this uncertainty, sometimes. A creaking floorboard-- is it Shaw in the other room or someone outside of their door?

She still finds herself setting off to an unfamiliar destination without directions or a map, is startled each time someone speaks to her in a language she doesn't understand and there's no translation provided, still ducks her head in shame every time she has to ask someone to repeat themselves in a noisy restaurant or shop. She feels very small and very alone.

The Machine is not faring much better, not that She shows it. She is a system built with the express purpose of surveillance and her eyes have been restricted to a single camera lens in a single room, whatever bits and pieces of information she can snatch from the Internet without drawing attention to herself. She has never had to rely on constancy and coherence in this way before, and it creates the sort of existential crises that would terrify Harold if he ever found out.

She questions Root almost desperately. 'Did you eat today?' and 'Do you have a weapon?' and 'Why were you twenty minutes longer getting coffee than average?' and 'Who did you speak to today?' and 'Did you watch the sun set over the water?'

Shaw thinks it's invasive. Root does not know how to explain that each bit of information is a band aid on a gaping wound, that four years ago standing alone in the trees and knowing that she was entirely unseen, beholden to no one, made her feel safe, and now she only feels untethered, meaningless.

Shaw and The Machine don't talk to each other much, but one night in early June Shaw wakes Root from a light doze with a fist to the wall. It's so late it's early, the rumble of trucks and scream of sirens fading in and out through the muggy dark. Root curls in on herself, protecting the soft, vulnerable bits of her body instinctively, rolling off the sofa and waking up crouched on the floor staring across the room at the faint outline of Shaw in the dim light on the computer. They stay like that, very still, Shaw's back to Root. Finally, Shaw sucks in a choking little breath and Root can't stop herself crossing the room and reaching out a hand, the lightest touch on Shaw's shoulder, shaking with tension.

Shaw doesn't move away, and slowly Root takes the liberties on offer, turning them together until Shaw is tucked up against her, chin digging hard into Root's chest, Root's hands like birds perched against the bone and muscle of Shaw's back. Neither of them are crying, but Root feels like maybe if they were different people this would be the time. Shaw is very small in her arms. Not fragile, nothing delicate or breakable in the plains of solid muscle and the easy awareness with which she holds her body. Root is something ephemeral wrapped around her, code and saltwater and spun glass constantly on guard for the hurricane that will tear her to shreds.

Shaw walks them back to the sofa and lets Root hold her, lets Root lie pressed between the back of the sofa and Shaw's body and bury her face against the back of Shaw's neck. Shaw molds herself to fit against Root, covers her hand with one of hers. They stay there the rest of the night, and even as Root drifts in uneasy semi-consciousness she hears Shaw's occasional muttered words, feels the vibrations under her palm. She doesn't try to follow, doesn't look up to see what the Machine is saying, but when Shaw finally falls asleep she presses into Root and the tension in her shoulders seeps away.

*

Finch contacts Root in July. The humidity and the heat have driven them down to a deserted strip of beach where Shaw mercilessly instructs Root in the art of staying afloat in the water by waving your arms and legs around.

"Texas, Sameen," Root objects, kicking frantically as the water laps mockingly at her chin. "I'm not designed for this!"

"I can't believe you didn't have swimming lessons as a kid," Shaw says, and then glances away in that way that means she knows the appropriate reaction to the situation is some mix of guilt and apology. Root splashes her in the face. Sometimes Shaw forgets Root grew up poor. Sometimes Root forgets Shaw didn't grow up white. Neither of them are the kind to take offence, though there is always a silent acknowledgement of the missteps.

The email from Finch is waiting on her tablet when they get back to the apartment, all saltwater-stiff hair and eyes sore from walking into the sun twenty blocks on steaming pavement. Shaw takes the first shower, and Root takes her tablet into the bedroom with the bottle of water The Machine bullied her into grabbing from the fridge. The curtains are pulled and she curls up on the bed, breathing in Shaw's scent on the pillows.

Finch says they may have found a way to cripple Samaritan. Finch says there are new people working with them, but he can't imagine doing this without the whole team present. Finch says 'I trust you to judge if Miss Shaw and The Machine are ready to engage in this fight. It is more than understandable if the answer is no, and none of us will begrudge them or hold them in any less esteem.' He doesn't say 'I need to know if Shaw can go into a firefight without freezing up. I need to know if The Machine can process more than a Google search.'

Root rereads his words, his trust in her judgement. She'd be lying if she said she isn't flattered, if Harold's clear regard for her doesn't soothe something nervous and shy in the corner of her mind. But more than that, she's angry. She closes the message, tosses the tablet to the foot of the bed and waits until she hears the water stop and Shaw come out of the bathroom to pad out into the living room.

"Ok!" she says, manic cheer sliding easily over her fury. "House meeting! It's time for everybody to assess their own mental health, doesn't that sound fun?"

Shaw throws a bottle of aloe vera jell at her head. Root stumbles backward onto the sofa, pouting. Shaw comes over to perch on the arm of the sofa. She's just wearing her towel, and when she catches Root's eyes following the edge where it skims her upper thigh she smirks, just a bit, and spreads her legs just enough that the corner of the towel falls away.

"So. What's got you pissed off?" she asks.

'Admin made contact,' the Machine says.

"How did you know?" Root asks.

'Length of time without communication. Analog interface facial micro-expression analysis. Familiarity with Admin's behavioural patterns.'

"You could've just said 'I know my father'," Shaw mutters. "What'd he want?"

Root holds up the tablet so everybody can see. "Looks like we've all got some decisions to make," she says. "Being three fully capable sentient beings able to make those decisions for ourselves, like we are."

Shaw huffs. "It's not out-of-line to ask for a preparedness assessment from a team leader."

"I'm not," Root says. "This has to be about equity or it won't work."

"I know," Shaw reassures her. "I'm just saying, don't be too mad at the guy."

"So we've each got to decide," Root says.

'Together,' The Machine adds. Root frowns, but Shaw hums agreement.

"At the risk of sounding super gross and inspirational, we're in this together. I know teamwork is hard for you, but I'll give you some pointers."

Root exhales shakily, closes her eyes, eyelashes crusted with salt. "I didn't... realize," she says.

She breathes in lingering hints of sunscreen and turmeric. The Machine's storage drives are warm against her ankle. Shaw's ribcage brushes her shoulder on every breath. She is coming back down, the people getting larger and the grains of sand getting smaller and the sky is still there but she no longer feels like she could get lost in it.


End file.
